Robust image watermarking in the subband or discrete cosine transform domain

Abstract

In this paper a method is presented for copyright protection in digital images. Copyright protection is achieved by embedding an invisible signal, known as digital signature or watermark, in the digital image. The method proposed in this paper casts the signature in the frequency domain by slightly modifying the values of randomly selected DC coefficients of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) of the image. The same method is applied also on the Subband or Wavelet Transform coefficients. An adaptive method is proposed also based on perceptual criteria that guarantees the invisibility of the watermark and avoids the deterioration of the image. Signature detection is done via hypothesis testing, without to use any information from the original image. The watermarks embedded by the proposed method are very resistant to JPEG and other frequently used compression. Experimental results using real image data verify the effectiveness of the method.